Lonely Planet Usa, LLC

A beat up old car, a few dollars in the pocket, and a sense of adventure.

That’s all Tony and Maureen Wheeler needed for the trip of a lifetime. After meeting on a bench in Regent’s Park, they married a year later. For their honeymoon they crossed Europe and Asia overland, all the way to Australia and at the end of it all they were broke...and couldn’t have been happier. It was too amazing an experience to keep to themselves.

Urged on by their friends, they wrote, typed and stapled together their very first travel guide, Across Asia on the Cheap. Within a week they’d sold 1500 copies and Lonely Planet was born.

One hundred million guidebooks later, Lonely Planet is now the world’s leading guidebook publisher with over 500 titles available across 15 languages. Ten of Lonely Planet's guidebooks have sold over 1 million copies each, including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and India.

Now, almost 50 years later, we're moving in a new direction: digital. In particular, we're overhauling our desktop and mobile offerings and preparing to launch Lonely Planet into the 21st—nay, the 27th century. The ultimate goal is to create a kind of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy for travelers: a way of accessing rich, powerful, and contextual information about people, places, and things, whether you're on your computer in SOMA or on your smartphone in Kandahar.

Based on that description, you may be tempted to say that we're building an encyclopedia. Not so fast. Instead of a general reference tool, we're building a targeted searchlight for road warriors, a cicerone for globetrotters, a traveling companion that quickly and intelligently reports on everything from popular phrases to wall outlets to lethal animals. Because you have better things to do than getting eaten by a Komodo dragon on your honeymoon.

What you see right now—our current website and apps—are the preface to a much grander vision that we hope to implement in the very near future. To that end, we're hiring the best and brightest from all over the globe with the intention of forming a world-class technology team. In other words: don't think of us as a company that prints books. We're a technology company, and we're pretty stoked about it.